EYÜP

When the Ottomans built a shrine around a revered tomb that dated back to the first Arab siege of Constantinople, Eyup became the most fashionable place to be buried. Quite an industry grew up around death making Eyup a lovely, peaceful and quite strange place to visit.

I got bored one afternoon.

The day before I had gone to the docks at Eminonu, next to the Galata bridge. It was busy and vibrant. The place was filled with people. Hustle and bustle. Eating fish sandwiches and drinking bright red pickle juice from one of the boats bobbing on the quayside. Each vessel pitching violently and the flaming grills looked terrifying to be around.

Sunday was different. Sunday was quiet. Only a handful of people around. The afternoon was sunny but cold, an icy wind blowing in off the Golden Horn. The big plaza was empty and the concrete benches were stark and grim. Thrown away newspapers and fish wrappings blew around, catching here and there on a lamp-post or a step.

What to do? I took a walk along the lower gallery of the Galata Bridge, thinking about eating in one of the fish restaurants. All closed. Boat trip? I could get a ferry just to say I'd been to Asia but that seemed like a waste of an afternoon.

Eyup looked interesting and there was a ferry that ran up the Golden Horn. The terminal is not easy to find. It is a little wooden hut tucked out of the way. Beyond the main ferry terminal. Beyond the bus terminal. Beyond the tourist cruise boats, looking desperate for trade on a midwinter's afternoon. I bought a jeton and passed through the turnstile.

There is only one ferry an hour and eventually it turned up. It was bitterly cold once it got moving but I stood outside at the stern. I watched the ancient city pass by and realised that this was how it was meant to be seen. This is what the emperors, Romans and Greeks and Ottomans, wanted you to see.

It looks theatrical, like someone had painted it on a set backdrop, from the water. Two thousand years are stretched out in front of you, every age and every phase of Istanbul's history. The Haghia Sophia just visible. A mosque on every hilltop. The Valens aqueduct could not look any more Roman if it tried. The modern Halic, Ataturk and Metro bridges in contrast. Drifting along past the old Greek quarter, the Patriarchate, the domes of the Church of the Pammakristos, the old Greek college looking like any number of bad English civic buildings from the turn of the century. The big, grey bulk of the iron church of the Bulgarians. The city walls tumbling down to the sea and the remains of a palace drift past.

The ferry zig-zagged its way up the Golden Horn, stopping on one side and then the other as it went. Inside the windows were steamed up, trays of tea glasses whizzing past, people crowded inside away from the cold. On deck were only a handful of people. We were the ones who did not see this view every single day and would put up with the bitter wind just to look out. Next to me was a group of men whose home I could only guess at. They wore silk, embroidered caps. They had oval, Asian faces. Long tunics hung down below the hems of their winter coats. It gave me a sense of what a great crossroads I was at.

Almost an hour later the ferry pulled into the quay at Eyup. People poured off. Simit sellers touted for business. The air was clear and crisp and wintery. Green hills circled the little port, flecked with white like patches of snow. A cable car snaked its way up one of the hills. Calm water and pine trees, hills coming down to the sea, the cold and the sunshine. Weirdly, I felt like I was back in Scotland. It could be the west coast, a little Argyll fishing town.

I crossed the busy road and walked north towards the hills. A cobbled and stepped lane climbed its way up. And I realised that the white flecks were not snow but graves. Hundreds and hundreds of white stone markers. Ottoman gravestones, pillars about a metre high carved with beautiful Arabic calligraphy. This was a city of the dead. It had lanes with names and signs, grave plots were numbered. Arrows with family names pointed to little paths or steps that dropped precariously down the hillsides.

I climbed the main path. Terraces of graves were everywhere. Crowds of people, families and couples and children, went the same way. Just a Sunday afternoon stroll. It was one of the loveliest cemeteries I had ever visited. Peaceful. The tombs were amongst trees, the grave markers like part of the forest. In tune with nature. The graves were well tended, these were not forgotten people.

Higher and higher until a terrace at the top. Bizarrely, a cable car station right in the middle of the cemetery. Fight your way through the selfie-sticks and get a stunning view down the Golden Horn.

Beside it is the Pierre Loti cafe, with its period decor and waiters dressed in turn of the century uniforms. Loti was a novelist who frequented a cafe in Eyup. No-one knows for sure which one it is but everyone seems to have settled on it being this one. Does it matter? It's a hell of a spot.

Behind the cafe is a street market. Again, not something you expect to see in a cemetery. Stalls selling fried potatoes and purses. It felt strangely festive, being in the cold in a little market.

I walked back down the hill the way I came. At the bottom the path leads into a maze of lanes between religious buildings. Afternoon prayers had finished and the mosques were emptying. A crush of people into the little lanes and then quiet. Istanbul was the first real Muslim city I have ever spent much time in and it has a rhythm you get used to. The day rises and falls on a tide of long, wailing calls, the sudden disappearance of people, wave of (mostly) men pouring back on to the street and finally normal life continues.

.

There is a strange feel to Eyup compared to the rest of Istanbul. It kind of feels special, like the people here have a real reverence for it. Eyup Ensari's tomb is a centre for worship and pilgrimage. The mosque is surrounded by other tombs and cemeteries, some open, some in walled gardens. Forests of the same grave markers I saw on the hillside are everywhere. Turbes, great mausoleums filled with green velvet draped coffins, that you can enter and gawp at. In a tent children practiced some kind of traditional flute and the simple music filled the air. It was peaceful and strange, a funerary complex, an Islamic city of the dead beyond the walls of Christian Constantinople.

I walked back to the ferry terminal. I liked Eyup and I was sorry to leave. I got on the ferry as the sun disappeared behind the hills of the peninsula and a deep shadow creeped across the sea. It was bitterly cold now and it reminded me of how close Christmas was, an alien thought in a land like this.

The ferry made its slow way back down the Golden Horn, drifting beneath bridges as I stood on deck once again and watched the sunset. Eventually we reached Eminonu and the horizon was a jumble of black domes and minarets silhouetted against the amber sky.

Back to Istanbul Home